Ask Lemmy

Depends on where you say it but my most polarized take was: investment based on interest (usury) is just a legalized form of fraud.

You can always make the argument that charging money on money is literally how much of the global economy functions, but from a purely ethical perspective, it has the same if not worse effect of how a landlord rents land.

Yeah it can work, but often times it just goes unregulated and becomes a form of abuse designed to milk you dry.

Everything relating to loans these days is backed by some mega bank, which is in cahoots with every other bank, which also runs the federal reserve in the USA, so they basically have overwhelming control of the economy, which happens to be built on trillions of dollars of debt servicing (35t for the government).

The 2008 market crash was a result of fraud at basically every level of the economy from a single person all the way to the board members of banks like BofA, Chase, etc and even the SEC. Realtors were selling faulty and risky adjustable rate mortgages, which were then being packaged into mortgage backed securities (MBS), which were then being misreported as AAA value by every rating agency who were also in cahoots with every bank, which were then being packed into huge collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) which they themselves were being repackaged into even bigger CDOs and synthetic CDOs which every bank was basically gambling money on.

All it took was for the faulty mortages to start to fail past only something like 8%, and every thing backing that (MBS, CDOs) collapsed and lost value.

Except because about the only people who were trading these massive gambling pools were banks, so they lied about the value of the assets (particularly the MBSs via aformentioned ratings agencies) which they sold and then promptly shorted to protect themselves from the problem they created.

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Sharing this sentiment will basically get you laughed out of the room from any finance program because so much of the economy is fundamentally based around interest, ie the cost of borrowing money. Even genuinely safe options like credit unions still have interest, albeit at much much lower rates that are much more practical.

But to me, it will always seem like a form of fraud.

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In case your wondering, the reason its polarizing is because there is a significant portion of people that actually do believe the above, notably a lot of Islamic countries. They have lots of banks that do not engage in interest based transactions, which is interesting but often seems to lack any research about it compared to a typical system.

The global market also doesn't take them too seriously because most of those countries (controversially) also have regular banks too, that also just so happened to be involved with schemes that caused economic turmoil, especially countries that take IMF loans. Most of them have shot themselves in the foot already and have nothing much to stand on now.